A lesser tragedy of 9/11 was that it cancelled the post-Communist reckoning we thought we’d have plenty of time for now that history had come to a much-bruited “end.” The Soviet archives were thrown open and, finally, academics and partisans could get down to the dirty work of examining who was right during the cold war, whether “Kreminology” in the West – the yield of so much imaginative interpolation and psychological profiling – was ever a valuable field at all. The late 90's was a period of revisionism and reassessment.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Depending on whom you consult, this is either the absolute last moment for a Communist to have lost his illusions and joined the opposition – or it wasn’t. (The Kronstadt Rebellion in 1921 was one; the kidnapping and execution of Andres Nin in Spain in 1937 was another; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 was another; and so it went right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.)
Names like Rajk, Rakosi, Nagy and Kadar are less remembered than they ought to be. Rajk was an old party loyalist who, because his loyalty licensed them to make international contacts before World War II, was easily accused of consorting with the “imperialist” enemy once the real Soviet imperial consolidation of the Warsaw Pact era began. Rakosi was his chief persecutor, himself later installed as head of the puppet regime in Budapest controlled by Moscow. When Nagy's government came to power under Khruschev's de-Stalinization period, Rakosi had plotted a return to the old order. He used NATO's buildup of troops in Austria as the linchpin for convincing the Central Committee that Nagy was too destabilizing a force for Hungary. Rakosi was right in the sense that, once Nagy regained power, he called for open revolt against Soviet hegemony, which led to the formation of Workers Councils, student organizations and the drafting of the "Sixteen Point" manifesto demanding industrial and agrarian reforms, more democracy, and freedom of speech.
The 1956 Revolution brought this sepsis in the satellites to worldwide attention:
On November 4, Soviet tanks entered Budapest. After several days of fierce fighting, Soviet control was restored. In the battle, several thousand Hungarians were killed; many more thousands were deported to the Soviet Union. The revolution’s leadership—including Imre Nagy, who had previously served as prime minister but had been expelled from the Communist party for liberalizing tendencies, only to become prime minister again during the upheaval—was seized by the Soviet military, placed on trial, and, in the case of Nagy and a few others, executed.
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